Amazon cloud computing outage disrupts Snapchat, Airbnb and online services worldwide

Internet users around the world faced widespread disruption on Monday because of a problem with Amazon's cloud computing service in the United States.

The outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) affected dozens of major online operations, including social media app Snapchat, the Roblox and Fortnite video games, but also Airbnb and several banks in the United Kingdom.

Some of Amazon’s own services were also affected, like its Ring doorbell cameras and its streaming platform Prime Video.

Users reported failures throughout the day on DownDetector, a website that tracks online outages.

About three hours after the disruption began on Monday morning, Amazon Web Services said it was starting to recover from the problem.

Relying on a handful of companies

AWS provides behind-the-scenes cloud computing infrastructure to many government departments, universities and businesses.

The company said Amazon pinned the outage on issues related to their domain name system, which converts web addresses into IP addresses so that websites and apps can load on devices connected to the internet.

Because much of the world now relies on three or four companies to provide the underlying infrastructure of the internet, “when there’s an issue like this, it can be really impactful” across many online services, said Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert at UK-based BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.

This is not the first time that issues with Amazon’s key services have caused widespread disruptions.

Many popular internet operations were down after a brief breakdown in 2023. AWS’s longest outage in recent history occurred in late 2021 and lasted more than five hours.

Amazon's rivals are not immune to these types of challenges.

In July 2024, an outage affecting Microsoft Windows computers disrupted airports, hospitals and organisations around the world. About 8.5 million systems crashed and could not be restarted.